Tag Archives: Steve Balmer

In their private question-and-answer session, Obama let his guard down and eventually shared some thoughts that revealed more about his view of American politics than perhaps anything he said publicly during the entire campaign. Election Day was still more than eight months away. But Obama, in a previously unreported riff, signaled surrender on one of the fights that had drawn him to politics in the first place: the effort to limit the flow of big money. It was a remarkable concession, one that would have stunned the campaign volunteers who believed so deeply in his promise to change the way politics works. It wasnâ€™t just that he was admitting that his own election prospects would be disproportionately influenced by super-rich donors like those he was addressing. He had already done that 11 days earlier, when he blessed a so-called super PAC collecting million-dollar checks to boost his reelection. What really distinguished his remarks to Gates and company from his carefully calibrated official position was the admission that the grassroots, people-powered politics he had long glorified might never again trump the swelling political buying power of the very richest donors.

â€œYou now have the potential of 200 people deciding who ends up being elected president every single time,â€ Obama told the group in response to a question about the 2010 Supreme Court ruling in a case called Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission, which gutted campaign finance restrictions and marked the beginning of a new big-money era in American politics.

Unless things changed dramatically, Obama predicted, â€œI may be the last presidential candidate who could win the way I won, which was coming out without a lot of special-interest support, without a handful of big corporate supporters, who was able to mobilize and had the time and the space to mobilize a grassroots effort, and then eventually got a lot of big donors, but started off small and was able to build. I think the capacity for somebody to do that is going to be much harder.â€ He continued, â€œIn this election, I will be able to, hopefully, match whatever check the Koch brothers want to write,â€ referring to the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch. â€œBut Iâ€™m an incumbent president who already had this huge network of support all across the country and millions of donors. Iâ€™m not sure that the next candidate after me is going to be able to compete in that same way.â€

Obama turned to face Gates, who stood awkwardly, his hands stuffed in his suit pants pockets. â€œAnd at that point, you genuinely have a situation where 10 peopleâ€”hey, you know, Bill could write a check.â€ And, Obama pointed out, it wasnâ€™t just Gates, whose fortune, then estimated at $61 billion, Democrats had been hoping to tap in a big way. â€œActually, there are probably five or six people in this room,â€ Obama said, gesturing to Ballmer and others, as nervous laughter spread through the crowd. Obama plowed ahead insistently, eyebrows raised, his voice rising with agitation as he stepped toward the donors. â€œI mean, there are five or six people in this room tonight that could simply make a decisionâ€”this will be the next presidentâ€”and probably at least get a nomination, if ultimately the person didnâ€™t win. And thatâ€™s not the way things are supposed to work.â€

The leader of the free worldâ€”the man who had built so much of his identity around the idea that average people could band together to change the world, the politician who once boldly declared that it was time to take government back from â€œthe cynics, and the lobbyists, and the special interests whoâ€™ve turned our government into a game only they can afford to playâ€â€”had become one of the biggest cynics of all. Here he was, freely admitting that American politics had fundamentally changed in a way that made it, at the highest levels, a game for the ultra-rich. And he was right.

Almost one year ago today, we laid out the nightmare scenario for Microsoft (MSFT) that could lead to its business collapsing. After laying it all out, we concluded, “Fortunately for Microsoft, none of this is going to happen.”

We were wrong.

A lot changed in the last year. Microsoft’s nightmare scenario is actually starting to take hold. We’re revisiting our slideshow from last year to see how things have played out.

Each number that follows has one piece of the nightmare scenario for Microsoft and an explanation of where Microsoft stands in comparison to that hypothetical situation.

While it’s going to take a while, Microsoft isn’t the business it used to be. (as I write this from my MacBook Pro)

It’s less than Windows 7. The UI is simpler. The media players are out. Its job is just to let your data have a place to live that you own, that you pay for, that you fully control. I would actually cut a direct deal with Amazon and create the ultimate cloud server that a user can manage themselves, that you pay for by the month. Need more services? Pay a little more. Need even more? Pay even more.

Now this would have to be promoted very crisply. With lots of influential individual developers non-disclosed and on-board long before it’s announced. But because the basic softrware already exists, on Rackspace and EC2, you can start the bootstrap right away.

You also produce a simple, beautiful client that runs on netbook hardware, and runs on every other platform you can get software on. Go ahead and develop iPhone and iPad apps. Let Apple reject them, and when they do, make it public issue. Hell, make it a public policy issue. (BTW, I would partner with Facebook on this. Let Joe Hewitt run the project. Don’t know who he is? Find out.)

Bottom-line: a really simple, user-administered, cloud OS is the next killer.

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This is a weblog about urban issues, technology, & culture published by Jordon Cooper since 2001. You can read about me and the site here and if you are looking for one of my columns in The StarPhoenix, you can find them here.